Obamacare: Proving Once Again That If It’s ‘Free’ You Can’t Afford It

byBrittany PoundersonDecember 4, 2014

This week my husband and I joined millions of Americans in receiving the news that our insurance premiums skyrocketed. Over the last 12 months I’ve personally heard countless stories from across the nation of people who had been cancelled from their plans, dumped off the employer insurance rolls because they had been, reduced to part time hours, and were experiencing crushing financial burdens with premiums that doubled and tripled in costs. I’ve sat back and shaken my head in disgust, but had felt thankfully insulated from that crushing burden as I had thus been lucky enough to avoid those experiences.

All of that changed this week when my new bill arrived at almost $700 a month and my blood pressure literally ripped the roof off the house. Almost $8,000.00 a year for the highest possible deductible my insurance company offers- at $7,500 per person or $15,000 for the family- which means combining my premiums and deductible that my insurance won’t even cover a Tylenol until I’ve spent $23,000 out of my own pocket for the year. In all of the years we’ve had this insurance policy, at a cost half of the current cost, we’ve never submitted a claim outside of the free annual physicals and blood work provided.

In an effort to keep our premiums low and affordable for our family, I’ve always treated our health insurance like I would our car insurance. We don’t buy expensive monthly car insurance in an effort to pay for the windshield wipers and dead batteries. No, we pay for those minor things out of pocket. We have car insurance there to do the heavy lifting should an accident occur and require a small fortune to fix or replace a vehicle. We’ve always done the same thing for our personal health insurance. We pay for the sick visits, negotiate any minor healthcare requirements with the provider, and had the insurance there as a safety net for any catastrophic event.

When I shared my personal story this week on my Facebook page and Twitter, the stories from many of you poured in. Many of them so bad that I felt terrible for complaining about my $700 a month new premium. But it renewed my absolute disgust for this fallacy that Obama and the Democrat leadership shoved down the throats of unwilling Americans….85% of which already HAD insurance and, out of those, 87% who were reportedly satisfied with their insurance plans pre-ObamaCare.

I was further infuriated when after receiving my bill, I did a little research and instantly landed on this gem from www.WhiteHouse.Gov:

Q: Will my premiums / costs go up because of health reform?

A: No.

According to the independent and non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, people who get coverage through their employer today will likely see lower premiums.

“The only thing we’re going to try to do is lower costs so that those cost savings are passed onto you. And we estimate we can cut the average family’s premium by about $2,500 per year,” he said.

There are countless factors involved that are resulting in people losing their plan and facing devastating price increases-and I’m not a policy wonk so don’t ask me for all of those details. Nevertheless, I do have the sense to know that when the government begins subsidizing a large volume of poorer, less healthy people to come into the insurance pool – it naturally increases the pool’s risk. And risk increases the cost to the insured. Those of us who manage to pay those premiums every month are taking the responsibility for the increased cost and higher risk pool. The” poor” take their subsidies (which the “rich” also pay for).

Factor in and multiply it by the millions of illegal aliens who are seeking medical assistance, and then add all of that with the fact that the insurers are having to now pay over 11 Billion dollars in projected fees and taxes to fund Obamacare- just for 2015- and we now know why premiums have shot up in all but 6 states- 35% just here in my home state of Texas.

Even more maddening, the Obama administration KNEW what would happen even as he was lying to the American public about it all. We know this because of studies done by the Obamacare architect Johnathon Gruber- who has been in the news recently for leaked footage with quotes such as:

“…the bill passed because of the stupidity of the American voters.”“…exploitation of the lack of economic understanding on the part of the American voter.”“…the only way we could take this on was by mislabeling it.” And manipulate the voter by using Kerry’s idea of saying “that they weren’t going to tax US – instead they were going to tax the evil insurance companies. But we all know that it’s really a tax on the people who holds those insurance plans.”“…using lack of transparency to a huge political advantage.”

While Obama spent years lying and manipulating the American public, he was sitting on studies conducted by the consultant and architect of Obamacare. These studies were conducted on Wisconsin at the request of former Wisconsin Democrat Governor Jim Boyle in 2010 and found this:

• 100,000 in that state would be dropped from their employees health insurance

predicted about 90 percent of individuals (in just one state study) without employer-sponsored or public insurance would see their premiums spike by an average of 41 percent.
• working-class families would be forced to pay a hidden tax to pay for the purchase of health insurance for a family of four earning up to $89,400,
• would shrink the numbers of people in the private insurance marketplace from 180,000 individuals to 30,000.
• would decrease the state’s number of uninsured by 65 percent by 2016, but doing so would come at the expense of other groups.

The Obama administration was fully aware of what the consequences would be in meddling in the free market, shredding the Constitution and forcing people to purchase a service (at the expense of another person). At the end of the day, unless we can replace Obamacare with a free market alternative…we are going to continue to see healthcare premiums climb and people are going to eventually be forced onto the exchange- which I imagine was the original intent and design.

And I have this to say to Big Daddy government who declares we are too stupid to know how to take care of ourselves…Just stop “helping.”

Related posts:

About The Author: Brittany Pounders is a conservative political commentator, blogger, and freelancer. She is a frequent guest columnist for The Toronto Sun, and can be heard through many different radio and media outlets such as The Blaze Radio Network, The Chris Salcedo Show, The Ed Dean Radio Show, has appeared on The Glenn Beck Show and regularly on cable news channels, including NewsmaxTv, One America News Network, America Trends, and the Fox News with Neil Cavuto. She resides in Texas with her husband and is raising three of the finest little people in the world.
Follow her on… Facebook or
@LibertyBritt